Abstract

Invasive plants threaten native plant communities. Surface coal mines in the Appalachian Mountains are among the most disturbed landscapes in North America, but information about land cover characteristics of Appalachian mined lands is lacking. The invasive shrub autumn olive (Elaeagnus umbellata) occurs on these sites and interferes with ecosystem recovery by outcompeting native trees, thus inhibiting re-establishment of the native woody-plant community. We analyzed Landsat 8 satellite imagery to describe autumn olive’s distribution on post-mined lands in southwestern Virginia within the Appalachian coalfield. Eight images from April 2013 through January 2015 served as input data. Calibration and validation data obtained from high-resolution aerial imagery were used to develop a land cover classification model that identified areas where autumn olive was a primary component of land cover. Results indicate that autumn olive cover was sufficiently dense to enable detection on approximately 12.6 % of post-mined lands within the study area. The classified map had user’s and producer’s accuracies of 85.3 and 78.6 %, respectively, for the autumn olive coverage class. Overall accuracy was assessed in reference to an independent validation dataset at 96.8 %. Autumn olive was detected more frequently on mines disturbed prior to 2003, the last year of known plantings, than on lands disturbed by more recent mining. These results indicate that autumn olive growing on reclaimed coal mines in Virginia and elsewhere in eastern USA can be mapped using Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager imagery; and that autumn olive occurrence is a significant landscape vegetation feature on former surface coal mines in the southwestern Virginia segment of the Appalachian coalfield.

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This draft manuscript is distributed solely for purposes of scientific peer review. Its content is deliberative and pre-decisional, so it must not be disclosed or released by reviewers. Because the manuscript has not yet been approved for publication by the U. S. Geological Survey (USGS), it does not represent any official USGS finding or policy.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the Virginia Department of Forestry and Working Lands LLC for providing the funding for this study. Additional support was provided by US Geological Survey Grant G12PC00073, “Making Multitemporal Work”, Richard Davis, Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy, provided invaluable advice and assistance including identification of field sites with autumn olive coverage. Funding for C.E. Zipper’s participation was provided in part by the Virginia Agricultural Experiment Station and the Hatch Program of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Funding for R.H. Wynne’s participation was provided in part by the Virginia Agricultural Experiment Station and the McIntire-Stennis Program of NIFA, USDA (Project Number 1007054, “Detecting and Forecasting the Consequences of Subtle and Gross Disturbance on Forest Carbon Cycling”). The use of any trade, product or firm names does not imply endorsement by the U.S. government.